


any and all ghosts

by ObscureReference



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Body Horror, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Ghosts, Horror, Mandy and Jenny are scary, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-09
Updated: 2016-06-09
Packaged: 2018-07-14 01:55:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7147376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ObscureReference/pseuds/ObscureReference
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Showers were the worst.</p><p>Ransom could at least pretend not to notice the freaky shit the rest of the time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	any and all ghosts

**Author's Note:**

> I actually posted this on my tumblr way back in April, felt weird about it and didn't decide to post it here until today. I'm a fan of horror, as you can probably tell. Please pay attention to the warnings listed in the tags because the last thing I would want is to make anyone feel uncomfortable. Body horror is mentioned and briefly described, but I don't personally think it's in incredible detail. But that varies from person to person so if you're squeamish at all, it's better to be safe, probably.

Showers were the worst.

Ransom could at least pretend not to notice the freaky shit the rest of the time.

It wasn’t not like the Not Ghosts were subtle, and he called them Not Ghosts because he’d seen enough movies to know that when you acknowledged something evil, it fed on that acknowledgement. Things were awful enough on their own without some kind of evil power booster.

Once, he’d mentioned how much he hated Halloween, and the team had teased him out loud about the paranormal antics he was routinely subject to. _That_ had been enough of a nightmare. It was probably the fact he’d been in the Faber rather than the Haus that had saved him, but he had no idea how far the Not Ghosts reach extended. He didn’t want to give them even an inch.

It wasn’t like they gave _him_ an inch. Holster gave him enough shit about it when they shared a bed, but _he_ wasn’t the one who could feel the wet heat of a corpse’s long dead breath on the back of his neck. Ransom could fucking _hear_ it when they wheezed, hear the ugly rattling in their chests that came from something not settling quite right, every breath punctuated by another lyric from Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You.” It had been the number one song of 1993. He’d looked it up.

It wasn’t even funny.  

Like, oh, poor Ransom, forced to listen to top 90s pop hits while there may or may not be a ghost walking around, how _spooooky_.

But it wasn’t fucking funny.

Once, he’d made the mistake of turning around. He’d had enough of the music and the breathing and, comforted by Holster’s heavy weight beside him on the mattress, Ransom had felt more annoyed than scared.

He had rolled over and opened his eyes.

He usually never saw them. Not in any sort of clarity, not enough to really _see_ them. But it had been dark and cloudy that night, the lights long since turned off, and Ransom figured that was why they let him look.

God. Their _faces_. Like they’d been s _tepped on_ , over and over and over until their bones had shattered and caved in on themselves. The blonde one’s jaw hung crooked, broken. The other didn’t seem to have a windpipe, period.

Ransom had squeezed his eyes shut then, and when he opened them again, the Not Ghosts were gone. But he could still hear Whitney Houston in his ear.

 

Showers were the worst.

He once asked Jack about it when no one else was around, desperate to convince himself that Holster or Bitty or _somebody_ had come back early and just really, really needed to use the john.

“It’s just you and me here, man,” Jack had said. “The boys are all in class.”

They couldn’t even given him the decency of plausible deniability. They couldn’t even give Ransom the benefit of even _toying_ with the idea it could have been Lardo or Holster or a frog who had stood outside Ransom’s shower for almost ten full minutes.

Though when he admitted it to himself, there was no way it could have been anyone else in the first place. The bathroom door didn’t move that way when anyone else opened it. The floorboards were never silent when anyone else stepped on them. Nobody else could get away with sneaking up on Ransom when he was in the fucking shower.

The thought made him a little hysterical. The Haus never gave anybody privacy.

It happened time and time again. One minute Ransom would be washing the soap out of his eyes, and the next there would be a shadow of a human splayed across the curtain. Someone waiting outside his shower.

He never opened it. He never threw the curtain back to check if there was a body there like he expected. Part of him thought the steam would be too much, would obscure them just enough to let him really _see_ them the way he never wanted to. The other part of him didn’t think he could take it if he opened the curtain and saw nothing there. It was a lose-lose situation. It always was.

So Ransom did what he did best.

He muffled the sounds of wheezing by cranking up the water pressure and listening to the old pipes rattle in the walls.

He slept in the same bed as Holster two days a week and pretended the breath on his neck was a result of the shitty air conditioning.

He bought earplugs.

And he resolutely denied the existence of any and all ghosts.

**Author's Note:**

> Original notes from my tumblr post: "did u know that ngozi said that mandy and jenny got trampled to death? (http://omgcheckplease.tumblr.com/post/59701327427) idk about you, but that’s sounds terrifying and awful. and it’s probably the fact this is such an upbeat comic that m&j look healthy and whole and not like girls who were tragically trampled. bc i’m sure that would drastically change the tone of everything. but here’s the alternative no one asked for."
> 
> I'm sure Mandy and Jenny don't mean any harm here but it would probably be a lot scarier if they looked the same as they moment they died. 
> 
> Jack's dialogue is taken word for word from that Halloween comic. My tumblr is http://someobscurereference.tumblr.com/ . Feel free to hmu there or leave a comment below!


End file.
